Questions businesses ask

It depends far less on floor area than on how many places on your site matter. List every entry and exit, every till or stock point, and every area where a dispute could arise, then decide what each view has to prove. As a rough guide a small shop often lands between four and eight cameras and a warehouse between eight and twenty, but the honest answer comes from the walk-through. Our camera count tool steps through it.

For most business sites 4MP is a sensible default, with 2MP fine for short-distance indoor views and 8MP reserved for wide areas where you need to zoom into recorded footage. Resolution alone does not decide detail, though: the lens, the distance and the lighting matter just as much. Work out the pixels per metre you need at the distance that matters rather than buying by megapixel. The resolution and lens guide shows how.

Long enough that an incident is still recoverable by the time someone notices it. Many Australian businesses settle between two weeks and three months, and stock loss is often the deciding factor because it can take weeks to show up in a stocktake. Retention is a product of camera count, bitrate, frame rate and drive capacity, so it is a design decision rather than a setting. You can size it with our storage calculator.

No. A recorder and cameras work entirely on a local network and will keep recording with the internet down. You need a connection only for remote viewing, offsite alerts and remote support, and in that case upload speed is the figure that matters, not download. See the network and bandwidth guide for sizing.

Generally yes, and that is the main practical difference between object detection and ordinary motion detection, which reacts to any pixel change including possums, rain and headlights. Detection is statistical rather than certain, so it will occasionally be wrong in both directions. That is why alerts come with the camera frame attached, so a person can decide in a few seconds. The AI versus motion detection guide compares them.

The usual expectations are clear signage at entrances and in covered areas, telling staff in advance what is recorded, and never covering toilets, change rooms or a neighbour's private space. Audio is treated more strictly than video in most Australian jurisdictions, so many businesses simply leave it off. Surveillance and privacy rules differ by state and territory, so this is general information and not legal advice. Our overview of CCTV law for business explains the landscape.

Often yes. If your cameras are standard IP cameras on an NVR and can provide an RTSP stream, an analytics layer can usually read them without replacing hardware. Older analogue cameras on a DVR, or very low-resolution or badly placed cameras, may not give a detection engine enough to work with. A review of the existing stream quality and placement tells you quickly, and terms like RTSP and ONVIF are explained in the glossary.

Wired with PoE is the default for business sites: one cable carries power and video, nothing depends on a battery, and the link does not drop when the microwave runs. Wireless is worth it where cabling genuinely is not possible, and in that case a point-to-point link between buildings is more reliable than putting cameras on Wi-Fi. Battery and solar cameras suit gates and remote corners, but they record events rather than continuously. The network guide covers the trade-offs.

A camera-by-camera list with model, lens and what each view is for, the recorder and drive capacity with the retention that produces, cabling and mounting method, network and remote access arrangements, commissioning and handover, and what ongoing support costs. It should also say who holds the admin passwords and who owns the footage. Ask every installer for their licence and insurance details, including us. There is a checklist in our guide to choosing an installer.

You should, as the business that paid for the system and operates the premises. That means footage recorded to a recorder you own, administrator credentials held by you, and the ability to export clips without going through a supplier. Ask directly whether any footage is uploaded to a third-party cloud platform and what happens to it if you change supplier. The installer guide lists the questions worth asking.

It cannot prevent anything, guarantee it will catch every event, or tell you what someone intended. It detects and classifies what appears in frame, flags it against rules you set, and sends you the frame; people still make every decision that follows. It also cannot fix a camera pointed at the wrong place or a view too dark to make out a person, which is why placement and lighting come first. Our after-hours alerts guide describes what the alerting actually does.

Yes, within limits. A 4G and solar camera post suits a gate, laydown yard or paddock, but it is built around event clips and alerts rather than continuous high-bitrate recording, which needs more power and data than most such setups have. Plan the data allowance around alert frames and short clips, and keep live viewing occasional. The network and bandwidth guide has the numbers.

Properly rated outdoor cameras do, provided the installation is right. Most cold-weather complaints are condensation inside a housing whose seal was disturbed, or a unit opened for service on a damp day, rather than a camera fault. Cable glands should point down, outdoor joints belong in a sealed enclosure, and heavy rain plus infrared produces glare, so a hooded position lit by existing site lighting performs better.

Walk the site and check every camera view on the recorder, not just on a phone, and confirm that a person at the distance that matters is identifiable rather than merely visible. Then test at night, export a clip to prove you can, check the recorded retention matches what was quoted, pull the power to confirm the recorder restarts and keeps recording, and verify that alerts reach the right inbox. Keep the camera list, credentials and network diagram somewhere other than the building.